Should the atrocities in Paris affect our response to the refugee crisis?

by Chris Bertram on November 20, 2015

(co-written with Sarah Fine, Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London)

Only two months ago Europeans were shocked by the picture of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee lying dead on a Turkish beach. Then, there was a profound sense that more should be done to help people fleeing Syria’s civil war. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the ISIS murders in Paris and with unconfirmed reports that at least one perpetrator may have travelled through Europe disguised as a Syrian refugee, there are loud calls to close our doors. For some of Europe’s politicians, such as UKIP’s Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen of France’s Front National, and the new right-wing Polish government, enough is enough: refugees trying to get to Europe should be stopped and nobody should be resettled here. There are demands for Schengen to be abandoned, together with current rules about freedom of movement within the European Union. In the United States, a similar debate is playing out, as a number of Republican governors, Presidential candidates and members of Congress push back against President Obama’s plans to welcome thousands of Syrian refugees. With so many in Europe and across the world outraged at the atrocities in Paris, these voices will be seductive, but if heeded they will lead us towards policies that would be profoundly mistaken and counterproductive.

Clamping down on refugees fleeing the region will not prevent acts of terror. In the European case, if ISIS and similar organisations wish to engage in further attacks, they do not need to bring anyone in from Syria to do so. The perpetrators who have been positively identified turn out to have been lawful residents of France and Belgium.
The further tightening of Europe’s external borders will not stop refugees from coming either, though it will ensure that they arrive in a yet more chaotic and dangerous manner. The scenes that shook us in the summer were in part the consequence of tight border controls, as desperate people, already denied any legal routes to safety, were forced into the hands of smugglers and onto flimsy boats. People willing to take mortal risks to escape war and persecution will not be deterred by new walls and fences, though more of them will drown. Aside from resulting in more deaths, all that reinforcing the existing barriers will do is bloat the bureaucracies who manage the border, enrich the companies who run detention centres, manufacture razor wire and market surveillance systems, and profit the smugglers and criminal gangs.

The arguments over the summer were about refugee quotas and finding a way to distribute the victims of war and persecution across Europe. With a few notable exceptions among its states, Europe’s commitment to helping refugees was already inadequate. 86 per cent of displaced persons across the world are confined to countries beyond our borders, such as Turkey and Pakistan. David Cameron and Theresa May often tell us that Britain has a “proud record” of helping those fleeing persecution, but a commitment to resettle just 20,000 refugees over five years, from a total of four million displaced Syrians, challenges that self-image. In fact, refugees and asylum seekers make up just 0.24 per cent of the UK’s population. The government has preferred to offer aid instead of refuge, but refusing to take people in will simply lead to larger and larger numbers being stuck in poorer countries in the region, and in the most stressed southern states of the EU, such as Italy and Greece, and languishing there in inhuman conditions, or trying to make their way north anyway, by chaotic and illegal methods.

Even if we could keep people out of Europe and confine them to refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and other neighbouring countries, this would be a foolhardy thing to do. Those countries are already under unsustainable levels of pressure dealing with volumes of refugees that Europe and the UK can hardly imagine. Combining the strain on those societies with the long-term denial of hope to refugees will not buy us peace and security. Someone once remarked that a refugee camp is an atrocity’s way of making a new atrocity. To avoid such outcomes it is imperative to relieve the pressure on the surrounding countries and to provide the victims of war with real opportunities to remake their lives and those of their children, with access to education and work.

Providing safe routes for some to travel to Europe (and elsewhere), with systems in place to register and assess claimants to asylum are a better guarantee for our security than razor wire and disordered attempts to evade it. If we know who is entering and give them support and hope, then we can assess any risks against a sound background of knowledge.

Of course we all want to feel safe and secure on our streets, and we want to live without the constant threat of terror atrocities. But we also need to think about the price we are willing to pay to avoid any such threats. Standing up for the values that supposedly define us means doing the right thing by the people who perished in the Bataclan and those who are drowning in the Aegean. If anything needs strengthening now, it is our resolve to redouble our efforts to protect refugees.

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Now, in the immediate aftermath of the ISIS murders in Paris and with unconfirmed reports that at least one perpetrator may have travelled through Europe disguised as a Syrian refugee

Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I believe this report was debunked on the night of the attack, a week ago. The passport was a (Turkish) fake, and was probably also meant to be found – it was on the ground near the body. Unless there is another report you are referring to, I question the wisdom of this being repeated and repeated, even to argue against its relevance. I think it’s a dangerous strawman.

The hardest way to get into the US legally is as a refugee. My immigration lawyer friend tells me it takes TWO YEARS. Why would a terrorist try to sneak into the US that way?

It is a rather odd thing. We’re constantly saying that we need to demonstrate to radical groups and regimes (such as Daesh) that our values and our way of life are best. And the best way to demonstrate this, apparently, is to reject our own values.

Very nicely said, Chris and Sarah. I think it’s worth repeating your point one more time that the largest refugee burdens are born, by far, by poor and less than stable countries close to the areas where there is trouble, and that all of our experience is that this is a bad idea as well as unfair and unreasonable.

In a just world, the atrocities in Paris should affect our response.
For most of us in Europe and America, we have little first-hand exposure to the horrors the refugees are fleeing. These moments of terror, when Paris is under attack for a few hours bring home the urgency of what people are enduring in times of war and oppression

I’m not sure whether the ‘why worry about ISIS agents among the refugees when radicalized domestic Muslims are more likely to kill us’ narrative is actually going to accomplish what those who use it really want. It’s probably just going to inflame prejudice by encouraging people to stop viewing the danger as “ISIS sleepers posing as refugees” and start seeing the danger as a more general evil lurking among all Muslims.

Worrying only about fake refugees rather than the mosque down the street is a step forward for the conservatives I know via social media.

I notice the headline and the story don’t say the same thing: headline says fingerprints ‘match’ and the body of the story says they have ‘similarities’. This whole controversy is confirmation bias swelling out of control.

Either way, it has no bearing on whether the US should make it harder than it is now for Syrian refugees to enter the US. Rationalized hysteria is always a bad idea.

I don’t know what to think any more. The world as I would like it to be and the world as it is are so far apart that the difficulty for me is trying to think of any way to bridge the gap rather than dwelling on the ideal.

I was a refugee. My experience led me to the view that a great deal of the culture of civilization and certainly of modernity is the product of the refugee experience. This is particularly true in the case of writers.

I don’t want to diminish the human dimension of the crisis but I suspect there is more at stake here than the fate of the displaced persons. Rejection of the refugees is more fundamentally a response to the unacknowledged social collapse in the West — superficially manifested in income inequality, austerity economics, there-is-no-alternative autocratic rule by revolving door elites.

If I may say, it as long struck me as very strange that, particularly in the Anglo world – US/UK/Canada – the leaders who are most scared, most liable to be hysterical, most likely to lose their nerve are called ‘realists’ or ‘the adults’. In the early 2000s it was Bush, Cheney, et. al. The US lost its nerve, and you see the result.

Let us give this a little different perspective. On 11/13 @130 people where killed by ISIS in Paris – a tragedy to be sure. On that day @27,000 children died from preventable disease and starvation. IF 130 deaths is a tragedy what are 27,000 deaths? Since 11/13 there have been no other ISIS attacks like Paris. Since 11/13 @ 162,000 innocent children have died. If we want to make the world a better and safer place would it not be more prudent to focus on the innocent people who are dying from preventable causes? This would include aiding refugees. My point is that there will be more terrorist attacks and there will be another evil organization to take the place of ISIS. Even if we let 10,000 refugees into the US and 10 of them commit terrorist attacks similar to Paris we will have saved 9990 lives at a cost of 130 lives. But keeping our all refugees will not stop terrorist attacks in the US because they may be committed by non-Muslim American citizens. BTB, I am willing to be one of the 130 lives lost insofar as I am not willing to change my daily activities and give into ‘fear and loathing.’

I sent my Democratic Congressman a nasty note this morning for not supporting the refugees coming to the US, and I would ask everyone else to do the same. What I find most astonishing is all the gun toting open carry enthusiasts I know are so anti-refugee. I thought your side arm made you indestructible? You fear a refugee shooting you at an outdoor cafe’, but aren’t concerned about the neighborhood NRA nut that is going to shoot up the local grade school or theater? What a weird place America has become.

For a long time now it has been dangerous to be a Jewish Parisian, a gay Parisian. Too many of our friends and neighbors are afraid to go out, for fear of Muslim violence. Now we have learned that it is dangerous simply to be any non Muslim Parisian.

We must stop the flow of refugees, because our elites here in France and throughout Europe have shown they have no conviction in our liberal values, and no desire to even attempt to innoculate then amongst the Muslim population.

The first freedom is freedom is freedom from violence. As long as there is a population that views us infidels and dogs and pigs to be slaughtered we are not free. If the political elite are not willing to preserve our most essential freedom, then they should at the least refrain from importing more violence into our lives.

Regarding Europe, I’d take a bit of a middle ground position: there should be a bit more vetting of the refugees being admitted, if for no other reason than political sustainability of relatively open borders. In the US, the vetting is already very substantial.

Of course the danger is less the terrorist you let slip through, than the youth you let in who later become disenchanted. But, preventing latent conversion to terrorism requires making immigrants/refugees feel more like valued members of society rather than lepers.

@jonnybutter of course you’re right about the irrelevance of the Paris attacker paths given the way US refugee admissions work, but note that the 3rd Stade de France bomber has been identified today and subject to the usual accuracy issues, is said by the Paris prosecutor to have entered Europe through the same Greek reception center as the other bomber (with the false passport).

YoursInTheSnow @ 13: I attended an event a few months ago where professional lobbyists were talking to a group of in-house counsel about how to get our views heard in Sacramento and Washington, and according to them, the most effective way is not to write or email, but to call. Apparently ringing phones are a real attention-grabber.

The issue of properly vetting refugees is separate from the issue of taking them in.

I think that the sort of chaotic, uncontrolled flood of people that we saw recently is objectively a bad thing for everyone. It makes it possible to slip terrorists in; as noted in a number of reports, many of the killers had been back and forth to Syria to train. It makes it more difficult for legitimate refugees (people with a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country) to reach asylum – as their cases get mixed up with those of people basically looking for work.

The case of the US is very different and restrictions are far less justified; there is extensive screening for Syrians to get admitted to the US. But there are pretty strong reasons why the sort of thing that we’ve been seeing played out in eastern Europe this year are not wise or sustainable. Separating that idea out from that of treating refugees well in a more controlled fashion is going to be important for immigrant advocates.

of course you’re right about the irrelevance of the Paris attacker paths given the way US refugee admissions work, but note…

Yes P O’Neil, ‘subject to the usual accuracy issues’, duly noted. I would never say that it’s impossible that a terrorist could get from Syria to Europe by stealth via refugee centers. I was making a comment on confirmation bias and sensationalism by news media. It is very Hollywood to focus on the ‘sneaking in with refugees’ angle. If you have an EU passport, which (I believe) most of the Paris attackers did, and surely most of the European ISIS aspirants do, there are probably several more comfortable ways to go and come, or there were. But nothing hinges on this issue , excepting what Marc says at #19.

I was responding to #5. And I was responding to the wave of xenophobic and racist hysteria in the US.

“Clamping down on refugees fleeing the region will not prevent acts of terror.” That’s the alpha and omega of the case. That some Daech fucker will use the refugee routes doesn’t mean that he’ll be stopped if you stop all refugees, it just means he’ll go through the routes in a different guise. If a Daech terrorist dressed as a businessman and flew to Belgium, would we then propose embargoing businessmen?
So, on a practical level, the refugee as terrorist motif is nonsense. But it will be used nevertheless, and will no doubt persuade the persuadable – that is, those uneasy about the refugees anyway. It won’t, of course, persuade anybody to make life back where the refugee came from better. We’ll spend millions to bomb it, but not one penny to make it better.

I’m curious exactly what is meant by “extensive screening” when it comes to Syrian refugees regardless of where they are admitted. A reasonable proportion of the refugees are fleeing situations where their original place of residence isn’t habitable, most basic government has broken down and one would imagine that related civil records are either non-existant, in a shambles or all but impossible to access.

Where did you live – the building I lived in doesn’t exist any more, for the last 6 months I lived in a camp on the turkish border.

Where did you work – my last employer is dead.

Do you have an ID # – my documents were stolen in route

On the one hand all of these look like shifty answers, on the other they could all be absolutely true and completely innocent.

In the end I expect “extensive screening” is basically running a persons name against CIA, FBI and Interpol lists and then, assuming it doesn’t match, deciding to trust them or not. Once a decision is made to not trust there aren’t going to be a lot of close calls or grey line decisions.

I’m curious exactly what is meant by “extensive screening” when it comes to Syrian refugees regardless of where they are admitted.

In the US, extensive vetting apparently tends to mean: ‘No’. Or ‘Wait another year or so’. I believe we’ve taken about 2000 from Syria since 2011 (please correct me if I’m wrong, which I am happy to cop to). IOW, the process in the US is arguably too constipated already – it surely doesn’t need to become more so. Our immigration system is a big sluggish mess anyway, and couldn’t have been reformed because…Mexicans. Now it can’t be reformed in any rational way – only ‘beefed up’ – because…..Syrians/Iraqis. sigh.

Surely a meaningful schema of ‘how to understand the refugee problem’ can only be formulated when we take account of the elephant in the room, i.e. the lack of meaningful intervention in the source countries designed to create conditions in which it’s a better option to stay, even in the case of war (I use the word ‘intervention’ more in its medical sense). We have ‘intervention’ today, but it’s not meaningful.

Too obvious? Well, the last 5 years hasn’t made any progress on the matter. From the time Libya became an absolutely lawless wasteland with two non-governments, one of which shelters on a ship near Tobruk, Syria erupted, Iraq disintegrated, and ISIL spread like an infection, I can’t think of a shred of positive progress.

I sometimes wonder if something like the ‘Union for the Mediterranean’ (a Sarkozy solution without a problem to address at the time) isn’t the kind of idea, which if properly constituted and with baseline agreements on aims, security etc, that could agree on establishing properly defended protectorates within problem areas (currently Libya, Syria and Iraq, at the least), with appropriate sharing of resources.

A UFTM-like grouping is more relevant to the middle east situation than the UN, and includes countries through which all the main refugee routes pass.

If a project like this were underway, the ‘refugee problem’ should become a) manageable over time and b) a metric for the progress in the source countries. Plus being a refugee would go back to being a temporary thing, with realistic hopes of ‘going home’ possible.

Right now, we have no clue whether the flow we see today is the maximum, or just a prelude to an emptying out of whole countries.

The problem with the current system of “relatively open borders” with regards to refugees in Europe is that it will inevitably produce the worst possible outcomes. Treacherous sea journeys, the use of fake passports, little to no screening or background checks, followed by long chaotic treks through hostile Eastern European countries – none of this is objectively a good thing. It is risking the collapse of the Schengen zone, the loss of public goodwill and most importantly it is endangering the lives of refugees and compromising Europe’s own security.

Perhaps one solution is to open up Europe’s borders without offering permanent resettlement – that way Europe can provide temporary shelter to the millions in need combined with the realism that they must return to their homelands when it is deemed to be safe.

Surely a meaningful schema of ‘how to understand the refugee problem’ can only be formulated when we take account of the elephant in the room, i.e. the lack of meaningful intervention in the source countries designed to create conditions in which it’s a better option to stay, even in the case of war (I use the word ‘intervention’ more in its medical sense). We have ‘intervention’ today, but it’s not meaningful.

I have argued elsewhere that one of the main justifications for or reasons for refugee protection, as it exists under the UN Convention and the law of many states, is that we 1) don’t know how to successfully undertake, 2) are not any good at, and 3) often cannot be reasonably expected to undertake (because of the costs, to us or to the local populations) the sort of “interventions” that would make refugee protection, as we know it, unnecessary. It would be nice if this wasn’t so, but the current situation is really the rule, and not an exception. We should not fool ourselves into thinking this case is somehow unusual, or the result of some lack of will on the part of “the west”, or the like. The only thing that’s (somewhat) unusual about this case is that many of the refugees are ending up/making their way to wealthy “western” countries, rather than the poor, less visible ones where they normally go.

Plus being a refugee would go back to being a temporary thing, with realistic hopes of ‘going home’ possible.

Unfortunately, that’s never really been the case for most refugees. That’s one of the reasons why a so-called “durable solution” (i.e., the right to remain for a long time, probably in perpetuity) has typically been seen as the 2nd most important thing owed to refugees, after the immediate duty of non refoulement . In this sense, again, the current situation is only unusual, insofar as it is, in that those fleeing are able to get to wealthy western states, not in the way the underlying situation is working out, or the underlying situation of the refugees at all.

Sandwichman@10: this has precedents; the US rejection of Jewish refugees from Europe in the 1930s is the obvious one. We ought to look more carefully at that one: that rejection swelled the ranks of Zionists and fed into the current conflict.

What it should affect, I think, is our willingness to intervene in the region. There’s a dynamic there that I don’t think anyone understands — every time the West does something there, especially something military, things get worse.

Right now, we have no clue whether the flow we see today is the maximum, or just a prelude to an emptying out of whole countries.

Sure we do. Climate change will cause vast and huge migrations of refugees. It’s a lock, and even the areas are pretty well known. Only question is how soon, how fast, where they will go, how they will be received. My prediction is sooner than we expect, and political instability will precede dis-habitation by several years.

“Plotting the location of western drone strikes on meteorological maps demonstrates another astounding coincidence: many of these attacks – from South Waziristan through northern Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iraq, Gaza, and Libya – are directly on or close to the 200 mm aridity line.” …EW

I find it frankly unbelievable that the discussions I see on here about the Syrian refugee crisis never acknowledge a) the role of European governments like France in creating the very problem by arming and funding the jihadists and b) the role of Turkey in doing the same and then deliberately exacerbating the refugee flow to Europe in order to exact a massive bribe from the EU to stop making worse a problem they helped create in the first place. None of this is happening in a vacuum, why are there so many Kurds among the refugees going to Europe? Because the Turkish govt deliberately denies them aid. Also for all this talk about how there may be some ISIS agents sprinkled in among the refugees, what about the thousands of former fighters now in Germany and Sweden who decided that the joy of slaughtering Christians and Alawites didn’t outweigh being smoked by a Mi-28 night hunter?

One of the best ways to lessen the severity of a crisis is to not to continue trying to make it worse, no?

“Sure we do. Climate change will cause vast and huge migrations of refugees. It’s a lock, and even the areas are pretty well known. Only question is how soon, how fast, where they will go, how they will be received.”

I have read a bit about this. At the moment the numbers of refugees and displaced persons are at the highest level since WW2 at over 50 million. From what I have read experts have predicted that by 2050 in 35 years time there will be 200-250 million of refugees and displaced people due to climate change

The Rude Pundit points out that Cuban terrorists were a real concern in the USA back when Rubio and Cruz’s brave daddies fled to the USA. Back then a concerted campaign of bombings didn’t prevent the USA from taking in refugees from Cuba. Apparently since then the USA has become chickenshit.

Separately, I’m really dubious about the idea that refugee status is a guaranteed entry into Europe. Apparently ISIS watch every single thing American and European leaders say, in which case they would be aware that until the last few months, getting into Europe as a refugee was hard, with high mortality risk. And once you get in you need money and guns. The Turkish govt apparently just arrested some ISIS activist in a five star hotel in Antalya. Why would these people risk a leaky boat and an uncertain future when official border controls are easily circumvented?

a) it generally refers to the ‘state’ as if is an abstract immutable entity, but in fact, the ‘state’ in question in the real situations of relevance is often very mutable, i.e. in the case of civil war (Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Syria,…), coup d’etat (Egypt, many African countries), external intervention (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, …) – the very situations most likely to create refugees. It can’t generally be assumed that the source and type of persecution is invariant.

E.g. it might be difficult for a Libyan national to claim refuge on the basis of ‘persecution’ today even if he/she was a target of Gaddafi, for the simple reason that we have very little idea of what is really going on now in Libya. The reason I would give would be ‘it’s just too ****ing dangerous’. Today, the situation in Iraq looks similar (and both Sunnis and Shias could claim persecution, but probably not by the state as such)…

b) I think there is a general philosophical problem when the term ‘protected ground’ includes both innate categories (race, gender etc) and contingent categories (religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group). Persecution of homosexuals is just wrong; ‘persecution’ of members of a murderous far-left revolutionary cult (a la Shining Path, ISIS) is probably quite reasonable.

This is where the UNDHR article 18 goes wrong – the final part is “…this right includes freedom to …, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” Who’s to say what rights can be arrogated under this article? It’s extremely problematic to say the least (I say this as someone who sees the UNDHR as one of the greatest achievements of our flawed civilisation… except for Article 18, that was written by people not thinking clearly on the matter of where ‘religious practice’ can lead…)

In sum, I suspect that once the very state itself breaks down, and there is generalised chaos, not many juridical definitions of any definition of ‘refugee’ can be tested, and we just have to do the best we can – short term: help those in need; long term: find ways to rebuild destroyed states.

@41 I don’t understand all the hate against LePen; sure, part of her political program are hideous: but those are precisely the parts that are most mainstream; “bipartisan”, so to speak.
What does distinguish LePen from Sarkozy?

@Manta. The difference between Le Pen and Sarkozy is that the latter is part of the political establishment, tied to financial and business interests, and an unrestrained prophet of neoliberalism and the financialisation of the French economy. He came to power in 2007 on the back of the traditional conservatism of older and retired French people and those living in the countryside and small towns, with the support of the media (largely owned by his cronies) and some dubious sources of financing. Le Pen is what is described in French as a “souverainiste” – i.e. not just a nationalist in the crude sense of the term but someone wary of foreign alliances and international structures, who wants to put French interests first. This extends from opposing the war in Syria to leaving the Euro and effectively the EU, to protecting French industry and jobs.
She is hated because she is therefore outside the consensus which has taken over both major French political parties in the last generation (neoliberal economics and uncritical worship if Europe, together with increasing communitarianism and encouragement of immigration) and is regarded as “dangerous populist” because she threatens this consensus.
Some of the criticism of Le Pen is justified, since its hard to say where nationalism ends and explicit racialism begins, but the appeal of her party, outside a hard core racialist element, is not based on that, but on her willingness to talk about issues (notably unemployment and social hopelessness) which the two main parties simply ignore.
Sarkozy has tried to imitate her rhetoric on nationalism and immigration, but it hasn’t really worked, because everybody understands what his game is, and everybody knows that he’s a friend of billionaires and probably deeply corrupt himself (almost all his associates are in prison, on trial or under investigation).
Le Pen is less important as a person (and she has a number unattractive characteristics) than as a lightning rod for a France that feels ignored and patronized by the major parties.

Thomas Beale at 40 – sorry to be slow to replay. I don’t have especially deep disagreements (except that I don’t think these points are in deep tension w/ my view.) Let me say something about one point, though:

In sum, I suspect that once the very state itself breaks down, and there is generalised chaos, not many juridical definitions of any definition of ‘refugee’ can be tested, and we just have to do the best we can – short term: help those in need; long term: find ways to rebuild destroyed states.

The first thing to note is that the actions of non-state actors can ground a refugee/asylum claim, so this need not be an obstacle. (I’ve written a bit on cases based on gang activity, and am otherwise working on a paper on non-state actors now. The very first asylum case I worked on in a legal capacity was someone fleeing the FARC in Colombia.) The “generalized chaos” problem is a more interesting and harder one. The normal approach now (in the US and at least some other places) is to provide so-called “temporary protected status” to people in such situations. This is a lesser form of relieve than asylum, and is, in many cases, inadequate, though sometimes it is enough. (Lots of technical issues that are too tedious to get into here now for me.) One special issues with TPS is that it often lasts a very long time, but does not ever entitle the holder to a “durable solution”, at least not in the US’s practice. But, if long-term residence without a foreseeable path home is what justifies granting refugees/asylees the right to remain perpetually (as I think/argue it does), then this should apply in some cases of TPS, too. So, that’s a serious shortcoming of current practice (at least in the US – I’m not sure how it’s handled elsewhere.)

As for the last bit, it would be great if we knew how to rebuild destroyed states! But, I see extremely little evidence that we know how to do this, even if we really wanted to, and this is especially so when control over the territory is highly contested. We obviously ought not _just_ throw up our hands, but it seems clear to me that there’s no easy solution down that path, either.

Yes, it’s easy to say the phrase ‘rebuild destroyed states’, and it sounds glib like that. Of course any programme of doing so has to bring politicians and public along every step of the way to avoid being an imposed structure, and that takes decades, during which any peace is extremely fragile. Creating high-quality institutions is just one of the challenges.

If we think functioning societies of the kind anyone would want to live in are like forest ecologies, then rebuilding is akin to the very long period of ‘succession’ phases that have to occur after a devastation (fire, drought, clearing etc) in order to re-establish any measure of diversity. I doubt if humans can be fast-tracked any more than plants, and the Northern Ireland process is always a go-to example of a relatively modest amount of state (re)building taking decades, and that’s with the advantage of being situated in a safe area, and having massive financial and political support.

Given that, allowing/causing functioning institutions and whole states to fail is truly a crime against some part of humanity.